When an initial storm hit the media back in April, my colleague and Chief Strategy Officer (and Buddy Media founder) of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Mike Lazerow, penned a column on Recode titled “Calm Down. Facebook Is Not Screwing You.” He outlined three important steps in every technological evolution and particularly in the internet era that is worth repeating:

The technology matures. More and more businesses jump in. And the free distribution decreases as the competition for attention and the importance of paid distribution increases.

Any for-profit business that creates tremendous value for other businesses by providing them a compelling forum to reach a highly-engaged audience is going to monetize that value. Additionally, they will work to ensure that the destination and channels they create remain a compelling place for mass audiences to return to, maintaining their ultimate value proposition.

One of the chief criticisms leveled at Facebook by some marketers is that Facebook used to encourage them to acquire fans and gave them ad formats to achieve this end goal. Thus that end goal in their mind allowed them a distribution channel to message those self-selecting fans with no additional promotional media cost.